G for ganna to hurt Akhilesh in UP's Jatland? NDA partner has a warning

First came Akhilesh Yadav's boast that the Samajwadi Party (SP) had turned a "chavanni into a rupaiyya". The barb was aimed at SP ally-turned-NDA partner, Jayant Chaudhary, the chief of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). Then, the murder of a Jat 'Haryanvi' singer Ankit Balyan in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in Shamli triggered a contest over which party really stood with the agrarian community. Now, Jayant has taken the battle from "chavanni-rypaiyya" to the sugarcane fields of western UP, with his "G for ganna, J for Jat" challenge. "S and P won't even get a chance," he said.

The exchange between the two is more than a wordplay battle. It shows the RLD and the SP competing for the political space in western UP before the 2027 Assembly election. The BJP, too, is pulling out all the stops to retain its hold. Can the RLD blunt Akhilesh's attacks on Jayant, which the RLD leader said, was an assault on Jat pride? Or, will agrarian dissatisfaction over sugarcane and its byproducts hurt the ruling BJP-led NDA alliance, at a time when the RLD is eyeing more seats in UP's sugar-growing Jatland.

Jats form just around 2% of UP's electorate, but their concentration in the western part of the state, bordering Haryana and Delhi, gives them considerable influence. They are estimated to constitute 12-15% of voters across 70-80 western UP seats and up to 35% in the northern-core belt of 30-40 seats covering sugarcane-growing Jat-dominated districts of Muzaffarnagar, Shamli, Baghpat, Meerut, Saharanpur and Bijnor. Their influence also extends to Hapur, Amroha, Moradabad, Bulandshahr, Aligarh and Mathura, in the west and the south of the core region.

In nearly a dozen UP districts, their share is estimated at 20-25%. Jat votes make the community influential in contests where margins can be slim. Their community networks and role in recent farmer mobilisations and protests, further amplify their electoral weight.

Working against the SP is the absence of the RLD (founded by Chaudhary Ajit Singh in 1996), which helped it reach Jat voters in 2022. The RLD joined the NDA before the 2024 Lok Sabha election after the BJP-led Centre accorded the Bharat Ratna to former PM Chaudhary Charan Singh (Chaudhary Ajit's father and Jayant's grandfather).

The BJP now has the advantage of the RLD's political space, along with its own organisation and the welfare pitch. Akhilesh has already challenged and taunted the RLD to double its contesting seats (33 in 2022). But the NDA is also facing discontent related to sugarcane and a scramble among allies for more seats, which includes the RLD. But Jayant's "G for ganna", not "Gurjar or Gujjar" also carries risks.

All said, politics is hotting up in Jatland. Can Jayant and the BJP keep Akhilesh out of western UP and Rohilkhand, where the INDIA bloc made gains in the 2024 Lok Sabha election?

The term of the current UP Assembly ends in May 2027, and the election to all 403 seats must be completed before then, unless the House is dissolved earlier.

FROM CHAVANNI TO G AND J, POLITICS HOTS UP IN WESTERN UP

Last month, at an event in Lucknow, Akhilesh recalled an old remark made by Jayant in the run-up to the UP 2022 polls, when they were allies. "Am I a chavanni that can simply be flipped over?" Jayant had said. Just when an SP-RLD alliance appeared likely, the RLD joined the NDA.

On August 16, Akhilesh, without naming Jayant, said the SP had entered alliances in which it "turned a chavanni into a rupayya", but those it empowered still deserted the party. SP leaders amplified the attack. They said that people who did not know the "ABCD of politics" had been turned first from a chavanni into an athanni, then into a rupee and finally "glittering gold".

Jayant initially avoided a direct confrontation. But at a rally in Saharanpur on September 3, he framed the comments as an insult to Chaudhary Charan Singh's legacy and the Jat community. Later, UP CM Yogi Adityanath called Akhilesh's remark, "an insult to democracy."

"Something comes after ABCD too," Jayant said. "G for ganna... and J, you all know what that stands for. We will trap them between G and J. S and P will never even arrive," he said,

Using this wordplay and formulation, the RLD chief fused caste identity with the belt's powerful agrarian symbol sugarcane, into an attack.

The SP media cell on X responded with a sharper play on "ganna". Attaching a video of a police lathicharge on farmers in UP, the SP handle said that its party had shielded Jayant when the BJP had politically "beaten him with sugarcane" and made him "worthy of ganna" in 2024. The RLD contested just two seats as part of the NDA. The SP accused Jayant of betraying the Jat community by joining the BJP. In the post, it also asked why he was now "shouting ganna" then, telling him to look in the mirror to see "where the sugarcane had landed".

But even before Jayant responded to Akhilesh's attack, the murder of 'Haryanvi' singer Akit Balyan had already sparked an intense fight to capture the political space.

HOW ANKIT BALYAN'S MURDER GOT POLITICISED

Then, the murder of Ankit Balyan on August 26 added law and order to the Jatland battle. According to police, four attackers ambushed the singer outside a gym in Shamli. Two suspected shooters, Mohit and Sumit, were later killed in a police encounter, while the hunt for the other accused continued. Some of the attackers, who were from Haryana, had criminal records and one was out of jail on bail when the attack took place.

Akhilesh quickly linked justice for Balyan to the wider community, saying the "entire Jat community of Uttar Pradesh" viewed the murder as an attack on itself. He sent Kairana MP Iqra Hasan to meet the family and spoke to Balyan's father over the phone.

A day later, Jayant paid a courtesy visit to UP CM Yogi Adityanath, and photos were released. Jayant also visited Balyan's family. After the encounter, the family had described the police action as "half-justice", saying the remaining assailants must also be caught.

Akhilesh, however, questioned whether the right people had been killed and asked why the government had failed to prevent the murder if it already knew about the criminals. The episode became another arena in which the SP and RLD competed to appear more responsive to Jat's anger and their sentiments.

Amid this fight, Jayant shoved "G for ganna into the narrative. But can that blunt the SP's charge?

GANNA CUTS BOTH WAYS FOR BJP-RLD

For the NDA, sugarcane numbers have given it a reason to boast. The UP government said more than 94% of current-season dues have been cleared, and 99 mills have paid farmers fully.

But aggregate figures can conceal grievances that have been brewing locally. Delayed payments by individual mills, rising cultivation and labour costs, and disputes over cane prices are politically potent. The Allahabad High Court has also questioned the authorities over delays in securing payments owed to farmers.

Lucknow-based agriculture professor Sudhir Panwar alleged on X that neither sugarcane nor Jats had received their due under the BJP. He also questioned the level of Jat representation in BJP-led governments. Panwar's argument reveals that there could be an opening available for the SP. While Jayant can invoke ganna, the Opposition can ask what farmers actually received for it.

CAN JAYANT, BJP TURN THE ROW INTO JAT PRIDE?

The RLD contested 33 seats in alliance with the SP in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election and won eight, while the SP won 111 of the 347 seats it contested. With Jayant Chaudhary now in the NDA, Akhilesh Yadav must either attract Jat voters directly or strengthen his PDA coalition of backward classes, Dalits and minorities, which he is attempting to broaden by wooing Pandits.

The SP has already placed MP Dimple Yadav at the forefront. Charu Chaudhary, the wife of Jayant, has also hit the campaign trail and addressed rallies, triggering speculation about her formal entry into politics.

The BJP-RLD combination appears well-placed in western Uttar Pradesh, but it is not friction-free. UP Sugar Industry Minister Laxmi Narayan Chaudhary recently argued that BJP candidates had won even when RLD leaders were aligned with other parties. At Aaj Tak's Mathura Panchayat, he sought to establish that Jats stood firmly with the BJP. The claim could be read as diminishing the electoral importance of BJP ally, the RLD. "Akhilesh didn't name Jayant," Chaudhary said.

Jayant must also contend with residual anger over the three farm laws, later repealed by the Centre. Jat farmers, particularly those mobilised by the Bharatiya Kisan Union and other groups, played a prominent role in the 2020-21 protests. Although the laws were repealed, demands for a legal guarantee for minimum support prices, rising input costs and a sense of agrarian neglect continue to fuel distrust among sections of the community in UP. That discontent, experts say, contributed to the BJP's losses in Jat-influenced Lok Sabha constituencies in 2023 — Muzaffarnagar and Kairana.

There is another complication. Some Gurjar voices were unhappy that Jayant's "G" stood only for "ganna" and "not Gurjar". Such reactions are too small to indicate a broader trend, but they reveal the risks. Before 2014, Gujjars largely moved between the RLD, the SP and the BSP as part of broader OBC-farmer-welfare coalitions in western UP. Since 2014, they have appeared to back the BJP. But the SP is now courting them aggressively through leaders like Raj Kumar Bhatti and a Muslim-Gurjar outreach.

Senior journalist and political analyst KP Malik, in his column in Dainik Bhaskar, warned that if Jayant could "reduce the old resentment among Jats and deepen his reach among Gurjars", the RLD's political influence could grow far beyond its seat tally, weakening the SP's prospective social coalition. "In politics, sometimes the attempt to describe an opponent as a chavanni ends up turning him into a rupee," he concluded, adding that "the value of a political coin is determined not by a leader's words, but by the people's votes".

Jayant's slogan might have put Akhilesh on the defensive for now, while the RLD frames it around Jat pride. But whether it becomes a political trap for Akhilesh will depend less on wordplay and more on the ground. The factors like sugarcane payments, candidate selection, alliance cohesion and social equations will ultimately determine who speaks for western UP and its 'ganna' farmers.